There will probably be a more ambitious version of this here at some point, but at the moment I like this one-take version.

Words and music (c) David Harley

Originally published as a poem in Vertical Images 2, 1987. I waited 30+ years for the melody to turn up, and finally did a make-it-up-as-you-go-along job earlier this year. The vocal here needs work – and I need to learn the words – but the arrangement is much better.

And yes, I know that it’s unlikely that M’Lord fought both at Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415). While the Black Death subsided in England from about 1350, outbreaks continued beyond the first half of the 15thcentury. I’m not sure how likely it was that M’Lord slept on silk sheets, but it’s a metaphor, not a history lesson…

A sort of West Midlands train blues. And yes, the title refers to GWR locomotives. How sad is that? I’ve put up versions of this before, but I like the blues-y feel of this dropped-D arrangement. I’ll be redoing the vocal, and probably putting a second (resonator) guitar over the top.

Vestapol isn’t mine, of course. But it seemed a logical place to go when the song finished… The tune is probably distantly related (in name, at least) to a parlour guitar piece published by Henry Worrall in the 1880s which is actually in open D, but the many train blues-y versions of the tune don’t resemble Worrall’s piece. Nevertheless, open D is often referred to as Vestapol tuning. My version is loosely based on an imperfectly remembered version I heard from Stefan Grossman in the 70s.

Words by Thomas Hood, tune a variation on ‘Andrew and his cutty gun’. Oddly, putting the two together was an idea that came out of a security workspace discussion. 🙂

Something rather more whimsical than the last couple of songs posted here. Strictly a demo: when the lightbulb lit up, I just sang it straight into the microphone.

I’m not sure yet how well it works without the printed words: I’ll have to try it live, I suppose, and maybe consider some editing. Might fit as light relief into a press gang set with darker songs like ‘On board of a man of war’ or ‘All things are quite silent’. The lyric is a poem by Thomas Hood (1799–1845). The tune I’ve used is (more or less) the A-tune to ‘Andrew and his Cutty Gun’ with a twist of ‘False Sir John’.

Another of my reviews for Folking.com. This time of a rather nice CD by Company of Players, an assemblage of young folkies from Said The Maiden, amongst others, who’ve put together a CD called Shakespeare Songs. Which isn’t quite what you might have expected: even if you hate Shakespeare, you may well like this. I do, anyway: very much!